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If I was President, This is the Speech I Would Give Tonight

My fellow Americans, we are well and truly fucked.

For far too long, we let the Republicans, and their corporate overlords, have their way with our country. On all fronts–the economy, social welfare, foreign and domestic policy–we let a bunch of cretinous sociopaths run amok, enacting the sorts of deranged and unscrupulous policies that would have made Ayn Rand look like a bleeding heart liberal.

And when I say we, I don’t mean just the spineless Democrats like myself who refused to stand up and be heard, or to stand for anything but business as usual. You are all to blame as well. Every single citizen of this country. You let demagogues like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh convince you that socialist bogeymen are hiding under your bed, and that the only way to scare them off is to hoard gold and grease up your guns. You should have shouted these lunatics down, mocked them off the airwaves and forced their publishers to pulp their ghost-written tomes. Instead, you made these racist nitwits multimillionaires, because they tickled your grievances and fondled your repressed bigotries.

You, my fellow citizens, have become convinced that taxes are the same thing as tyranny rather than the wages of civilization and that helping your neighbors and fellow citizens in their hour of need is a sin. And you still have the balls to call yourselves a Christian Nation! You go hunting for commies and pinkos and atheists when you should be hanging bankers from lampposts all along Wall Street. We’re in the middle of the worst depression since the Great One, and not only are you not out in the streets demanding jobs, fair wages and health care, but you’re bending over and letting the bankers fuck you sideways and then thanking them for it with a no-strings-attached bailout. It’s no wonder that, in ten short years, we’ve gone form the envy of the world to the embarrassment of nations.

Our economy is circling the drain. Everyone keeps asking “why?” and “what did we do?” like it’s a big fucking mystery. We outsourced all our jobs to other countries. We don’t make anything anymore. Other than overly elaborate shell games that swindle poeple out of their savings. In pursuit of cheap sneakers and cheaper television sets, we sent all our manufacturing jobs to India and China. Instead of paying people to work decent jobs we shuffle them into a hellish merry go round of bureaucracy, shuttling them between unemployment lines until they feel so disheartened and confused that they stop asking for help. The new American spirit is one that settles for drudgery out of fear. we used to be the nation that could count on there being a chicken in every pot. Now we settle for grade G beef (now with extra sawdust!) in our faux-tacos and hope we win the lottery, so we can afford all the overrated status symbols on which we’ve pinned all our life’s meaning.

We could put every unemployed, able-bodied American to work rebuilding our crumbling Infrastructure. Not only would it repair our roads and make our electrical grid and water system modern and terrorist-proof, but employ hundreds of thousands and stimulate the economy. But it might require a modest increase in taxes to fund, so fuck it. I hear rolling blackouts and potholes the size of craters on the moon are all the rage in developing nations. At least the ones we haven’t bombed back to the stone age.

Our fun little wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are, well, I’d be lying if I said they were going well. Frankly, we have no metric for success, since the bozo who started them didn’t outline any clear goals. And sure, I haven’t done anything to end them because I’m deathly afraid of looking like a pussy to this guy. We’ll never achieve anything that resembles a victory but then, that was never the point. We went to war to funnel taxpayer money to the defense industry. The wars exist solely to make more money for already-rich psychopaths who make bombs because they can’t get hard ons. Sure, we’re closing grocery stores and turning off the lights in small towns all across America, but at least our friends at Blackwater/Xe can enjoy the finer things in their new corporate headquarters in Dubai.

And if you have the misfortune to get sick, well, good luck. Our watered down Health Care Reform bill won’t nearly cut it and the Republican alternative plan, known as “Die quickly, you poor bastard” shockingly won’t help. But what did you really expect, genuine reform of a multibillion dollar industry that we let regulate itself? We didn’t do anything to fix the banks, who are scalping you into a stress-related heart condition (not covered by your employer’s plan) and we’re probably not going to do anything to stop the health care industry from profiting on your sickness either. Because this is a free market and we’re all capitalists now, even those of you who are poor and would actually benefit form a little judicious socialism, applied liberally. But go ahead and keep voting against your interests. Maybe one day, you really will win the lottery and then you can be a celebrity jackass, just like you’ve always dreamed.

And for you school age kids out there, well, I hope you weren’t expecting a job when you graduate from college. Selling you those inflationary loans for four years of undergrad wasn’t done out of goodwill, a desire to see the youth of today succeed, or any of that civics and citizenship crap. You’re an integral part of the Education Bubble, kids. We need you to keep gobbling up credit and generating debt because at this point, it’s all that’s keeping our economy afloat. And don’t bother going to mommy and daddy for help because your father’s pension that he was earning for 30 years vanished in a game of Wall Street roulette.

Think of all that debt as doing your part for the future of this country. Seriously though, consider going back to grad school kids. Those new high tech fighter drones, the ones that are just like your military training simulations video games? Yeah, those won’t pay for themselves. But don’t worry, you’ll be flying them for real, and soon, because before long, we’ll have eliminated social security and the last shreds of the New Deal safety net, and you’ll have no other option but to join the army or starve to death in your parents basement. We desperately need a million more liberal arts grads with Masters degrees in English Literature. Putting you to work as a desk jockey in Kabul is the only way we can explain irony.

The truth is, we’re broke, and don’t have any real ideas how to fix the problems that are threatening to destabilize our once-great country. And if you think the economy is bad, keep in mind, all the smart people we have left in this country have actually been trying to fix that problem. We haven’t even started thinking about global warming and that one’s actually real, unlike our economy, which is just a bunch of paper dolls and voodoo.

If you want to see what the next few years will bring, go visit the ruins of Detroit. That’s not just the state of our union writ large, it’s our future come to haunt us in the present.